This meticulously researched and engagingly written book provides a detailed history of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), in which the U.S. Supreme Court nullified an Oregon statute requiring all children between the ages of eight and sixteen to attend public school. This decision had far-reaching immediate importance because it squelched a nationwide campaign by the Ku Klux Klan and other assorted nativists to destroy parochial education. It has enduring significance because the Court's decision provided a strong constitutional foundation for parental rights and helped to lay the groundwork for a right to privacy.

Although Pierce is curiously neglected in most constitutional law textbooks, it has received substantial attention from historians. Even though several earlier studies cover much of the same ground as this book, this important case always is worthy of fresh attention, and Paula Abrams in Cross Purposes enhances our understanding of it. She provides a thorough examination of the political forces in Oregon that produced the nation's only compulsory public education law, and she offers an exceptionally detailed analysis of the shrewd litigation strategies that enabled Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and other religious groups to successfully challenge the statute. It is a fascinating story, and Abrams's able telling of it should interest general readers as well as historians, lawyers, and constitutional scholars.

This book places Pierce in its proper context by recounting the many earlier controversies between religious minorities and public school systems dominated by Anglo-American Protestants and by explaining how the resurgence of nativism during and after World War I generated hostility against parochial schools. The book might, however, have benefited from a richer account of the complex cultural, ethnic, linguistic, theological, and liturgical tensions that provide a backdrop to Pierce. In particular, Abrams could have done more to explain why Roman Catholic and Lutheran parents struggled so valiantly to build and preserve parochial schools.

In explaining the constitutional background of Pierce, the book appropriately devotes considerable attention to Meyer v. Nebraska, a 1923 Supreme Court decision that made the outcome of Pierce almost inevitable by holding that states could not outlaw the teaching of German in nonpublic schools. Abrams, a professor of constitutional law, deftly explains how Meyer and Pierce provided a bridge between the Court's pre-1937 role as an arbiter of economic regulatory legislation and the Court's modern function as a guardian of noneconomic personal liberties. As Abrams explains, Meyer and Pierce both used a theory of limited government to nullify intrusions upon personal liberties, just as the Court had used a similar theory of substantive due process to invalidate laws that restricted economic liberty.

Abrams also explains how Meyer and Pierce presaged the process by which the Court would soon begin to nationalize various provisions of the Bill of Rights. In perhaps too brief a discussion, she concludes that the Court relied upon the well-established doctrine of substantive due process because the use of the First Amendment “would have required a dramatic expansion of constitutional law encompassing both the incorporation of the Bill of Rights and a redefinition of the First Amendment” (212).

Abrams makes effective use of the extensive primary sources that document the controversies over compulsory public education and the course of the Pierce litigation, particularly the archives of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Lutheran Schools Committee. She largely ignores, however, the extensive secondary literature on Pierce, which is mentioned not all in the text and is cited only sparingly in the footnotes. The book would have benefited from at least some engagement with the perspectives of numerous other scholars who have written about Pierce.

The book's accuracy is exceptionally high, despite its unqualified and questionable assertion that Warren G. Harding joined the Ku Klux Klan in a secret White House ceremony shortly after becoming president.

In a brief afterword, the book surveys the sprawling and controversial legacy of Pierce, which judges and litigants have invoked in support of an amazingly diverse array of rights, including abortion, homosexual conduct, the use of contraceptives, home schooling, school vouchers, and the visitation of children by grandparents. Abrams's otherwise succinct epilogue would have benefited from at least a bit more discussion of the present controversy about whether Pierce is too patriarchal and whether it unduly restricts the state's ability to protect children.

Pierce's role in establishing privacy rights has made it a useful decision for political liberals, while Pierce's protection of parental rights has given it almost iconic significance among many conservatives. As Abrams aptly points out, “Pierce and its modern progeny … address fundamental questions about the meaning of personhood in a democratic society” (232).